Hide out from the ones you know will love you
He lounges precariously on the rotting branch of a skyscraper tree and watches a lone brown leaf flutter in the slight breeze. His eyes never lift from the leaf, as though the power of his gaze alone might force it to stay. Hands wrapped around his lean body and two day old t-shirt, he sits and stares.
In stark contrast, she stands, head thrown back like a defiant Goddess of War, and she talks down to him from her place on the ground.
“It’s unreasonable. We just don’t have the financial capabilities. Be realistic and think it through. Do you truly want to survive in the corpse society we’d be thrown into, veritable pariahs for the rest of our lives?”
What she means is, “Think of my dreams. Think of my dreams and then think of my desolate face in fifteen years.” He knows it, yet he refuses to wrap his dreamer’s mind around her bloody, gritty practicalities. He sinks lower into the dead bark, and the branch wobbles threateningly.
“I know I’ve said it before, and I don’t mean to be so prolix and verbose, and I don’t want to be the harbinger of doom here, but I just think you’re not thinking it through. You don’t have the motivation to think it through, and that’s fine, but at least reason it out vicariously through me.”
What she means is, “Stop being so ignorant and just agree with me.” He knows she thinks him stupid, but he understands all about her practicalities.
And the lack thereof that got them into this mess.
“Look, I know you want to go to college and you can, you can and we could still keep it. This carpentry job pays well, you know it does, and Wilson won’t fire me after we graduate, I know he won’t.”
He speaks faster and faster as he goes on, his words culminating in an almost indistinguishable rush, and all the while he eyes the leaf as the wind blows harder.
“Don’t you think,” he pleads desperately, “don’t you think that just maybe our love will be enough for this to work?”
She glowers at him, with his innocent dreamer face, and she spits bitterly, “A heart carved into a dead tree will never grow.”
As she begins to walk away, she hits the tree and the exasperated branch snaps at last, throwing the boy and the leaf down to the ground.